For days the rain beat on the leaf litter and turned the pond into a nervous, irritable thing. Winter was overtaking autumn and the frogs and toads had all settled into the mud. The curlicues and bubble trails of the fish and minnows were already growing sluggish. Cold though the mornings were, there were turtles that still moved about every day, busy as the squirrels; their skin and shells were black like the loam they crawled through, but they were marked with the vivid yellow and orange of the foliage. The painted turtles were young and voracious. Frost-nipped weeds along the shore hid fat buried crickets and small fish to eat, and the dwindling daylight hours they spent on flat stones gathering warmth.
In the rushes, above the old, higher water line, was the nest where they had been born in the spring. As they grew, they spent more time burrowed in the muddy bottom of the pond, but the nest was in a safe place, and they slept nearby. With the frost staying longer each morning and creeping sooner each night, the little hole that marked the nest was soon as hard as the rest of the soil around the pond.
On an evening late in January , when the moon was thin, a fox came down out of the forest. It was hungry. It had dreamed minnows in the gaps where the ice met the muddy shore, but after pacing around the pond on its hurried feet, it could find no easy prey. Its nose brought it into the rushes, where it found the faint smell of the turtles’ infant eggshells. Scraping around in the next with its black paws, it found nothing but their smell, the sweet carrion smell of amphibians. The fox dug into the warm mud and dug and dug. After much effort, it stuck its head into the cold water that had filled the hole and pulled a small turtle out. The fox crunched into the young turtle’s shell with its sharp teeth. It was not a big meal and it and it was not what the fox had dreamed of, but it finished its meal there in the mud and the snow and left after it tough scraps and scratched marks from its paws.
